Dimensions of Perceptual Content

2020 ◽  
pp. 24-36
Author(s):  
Robert Audi
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Phenomenal Character ◽  
Causal Theory ◽  
Perceptual Content ◽  
Causal Role ◽  
Perceptual Knowledge ◽  
Causal Theory Of Perception ◽  
The Right

This chapter presents a causal theory of perception according to which perceiving something is, in outline, equivalent to its producing or sustaining, in the right way, a phenomenal representation of it. Commonly, the perceived object plays this causal role reliably enough to yield perceptual knowledge, provided we form perceptual beliefs that appropriately correspond to what we see. But the theory does not imply that seeing is conceptual, entails believing, or has propositional perceptual content. The notion of content is clarified, and several types are described, including a hallucinatory kind. This causal representational view also accommodates “inner perception” of elements, such as images—as is appropriate to the breadth of “perception.” But the most important point here is that explaining the causal character of the perceptual relation partly on the basis of information represented in the phenomenal character of the perceptual experience does not entail the perceiver’s acquiring beliefs that propositionalize that information.

Intentionalism and Recurrent Cognitive Content

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Christopher Maloney
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Phenomenal Character ◽  
Perceptual Content ◽  
Conscious Perception ◽  
Cognitive Content ◽  
The Poor

Conscious perception carries distinctive phenomenal character. Intentionalism would account for this character by appeal to the wealth of information embedded in perceptual content while also cautioning that such opulent content exceeds the poor grasp of other types of conscious cognitive consideration. Intentionalism adds that introspective comparison of the differing phenomenal characters of contrastive perceptual episodes reveals only the episodes’ difference in content. Accordingly, intentionalism concludes that perceptual content alone determines phenomenal character. However, this conclusion fatally fails to accommodate the recalcitrant fact that the content of perceptual experience inferentially permeates reasoning, both theoretical and practical. So, the content of perception cannot be peculiar to that sensuous mode of cognition. Hence, it would seem that intentionalism is false.

The Price of Twin Earth

2020 ◽  
Vol 70 (281) ◽  
pp. 689-710
Author(s):  
Brandon James Ashby
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Phenomenal Character ◽  
Perceptual Content ◽  
Twin Earth ◽  
Content Internalism

Abstract Liberals about perceptual contents claim that perceptual experiences can represent kinds and specific, familiar individuals as such; they also claim that the representation of an individual or kind as such by a perceptual experience will be reflected in the phenomenal character of that experience. Conservatives always deny the latter and sometimes also the former claim. I argue that neither liberals nor conservatives have adequately appreciated how the content internalism/externalism debate bears on their views. I show that perceptual content internalism entails conservativism when conjoined with one other, extremely plausible premise. Hence, liberals are committed to perceptual contents externalism, yet they have failed to fully address the consequences that this has for their view. Moreover, the argument is easily adapted to perceptual experiences of Twin Earthable properties, like colour and shape. I use this last result to show why existing conservative arguments that appeal to Twin Earth plausibly overgeneralize.

Intentionalism’s Troubles Begin

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Christopher Maloney
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Phenomenal Character ◽  
The State ◽  
Perceptual Content ◽  
Conscious Perception ◽  
Cognitive Content ◽  
Cognitive States ◽  
Experiential Content ◽  
Over Time

This chapter puzzles over intentionalism’s odd exportation of the phenomenal character of perceptual experience. Evidently, a perceptual state's phenomenal character is intrinsic to the state while its content is not. So, intentionalism’s reduction of character to content stumbles right out of the blocks. Also, but contrary to fact, if content were phenomenally determinative, all cognitive states with the same content would have the same character. Since perceptual content admits of minimal logical or conceptual complexity, over time a perceiver may find herself in perceptual states that have the same content but, contrary to intentionalism, different phenomenal characters. Moreover, throughout a continuous period of phenomenally stable conscious perception a perceiver might reason from, or about, her experiential content. Her reasoning would ensure fluctuation in her cognitive content despite the constancy of her phenomenal character. In short, perceptual content’s availability to cognition generally undermines intentionalism. Content does not determine character.

Scepticism and the Senses

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Stroud
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Perceptual Knowledge ◽  
The World ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The Right ◽  
Sceptical Argument ◽  
Philosophical Scepticism

This chapter considers some lessons that can be learned from philosophical scepticism and some strategies to be pursued in understanding human knowledge in the right way. It examines the conception of perceptual experience and what is needed for a more accurate—and hence more trouble-free—account of what we can and do in fact perceive. It also discusses René Descartes’s sceptical argument and his notion of perceptual knowledge before concluding with an explanation of what it calls propositional perception to account for knowledge of the world. It argues that we can perceive particular objects without believing or knowing anything about them. It is only with such ‘propositional’ objects of perception that direct perceptual knowledge of the world is possible, since knowledge is knowledge of what is so.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Evan Franklin
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
Causal Role ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Agent Causation ◽  
The Right

This chapter lays out the book’s central question: Assuming agency reductionism—that is, the thesis that the causal role of the agent in all agential activities is reducible to the causal role of states and events involving the agent—is it possible to construct a defensible model of libertarianism? It is explained that most think the answer is negative and this is because they think libertarians must embrace some form of agent-causation in order to address the problems of luck and enhanced control. The thesis of the book is that these philosophers are mistaken: it is possible to construct a libertarian model of free will and moral responsibility within an agency reductionist framework that silences that central objections to libertarianism by simply taking the best compatibilist model of freedom and adding indeterminism in the right junctures of human agency. A brief summary of the chapters to follow is given.

Explaining Perceptual Knowledge

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Stroud
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
External World ◽  
Satisfactory Explanation ◽  
Perceptual Knowledge ◽  
Epistemological Problem ◽  
The Way

This chapter offers a response to Quassim Cassam’s ‘Seeing and Knowing’, which challenges some of the conditions Cassam thinks the author has imposed on a satisfactory explanation of our knowledge of the external world. According to Cassam, the conditions he specifies can be fulfilled in ways that explain how the knowledge is possible. What is at stake in this argument between Cassam and the author is the conception of what is perceived to be so that is needed to account for the kind of perceptual knowledge we all know we have. That is what must be in question in any promising move away from the overly restrictive conception of perceptual experience that gives rise to the hopelessness of the traditional epistemological problem. The author suggests that we should explore the conditions of successful ‘propositional’ perception of the way things are and emphasizes the promise of such a strategy.

In Defense of Perceptual Content

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanna Schellenberg
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Representational Content ◽  
Perceptual Content ◽  
Explanatory Role ◽  
Relational Understanding ◽  
The Way

Chapter 5 takes a step back and traces the way in which excessive demands on the notion of perceptual content invite an austere relationalist account of perception. It argues that any account that acknowledges the role of discriminatory, selective capacities in perception must acknowledge that perceptual states have representational content. The chapter shows that on a relational understanding of perceptual content, the fundamental insights of austere relationalism do not compete with representationalism. Most objections to the thesis that perceptual experience has representational content apply only to austere representationalist accounts, that is, accounts on which perceptual relations to the environment play no explanatory role. By arguing that perceptual relations and perceptual content are mutually dependent the chapter shows how Fregean particularism can avoid the pitfalls of both austere representationalism and austere relationalism. With relationalists, Fregean particularism argues that perception is constitutively relational, but with representationalists it argues that it is constitutively representational.

Perception and Primary Knowledge

2019 ◽  
pp. 34-69
Author(s):  
Michael Ayers
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Psychology ◽  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Phenomenological Analysis ◽  
A Priori Knowledge ◽  
Direct Realism ◽  
Perceptual Awareness ◽  
Perceptual Knowledge ◽  
Decisive Reason ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge

A phenomenological analysis of perceptual experience, conducted with an eye on experimental psychology, addresses a series of questions. What is phenomenology? What makes perception of one’s environment as one’s environment? Does the phenomenal integration of the senses give decisive reason for ‘direct realism’? Do we perceive causal relations, or only infer them? Are we perceptually aware of acting? Are we perceptually aware of the causality of perception itself, and if so, in some cases or in all? It is argued that perceiving is not only direct cognitive contact with reality, but that the perceptual relation is itself an object of perceptual awareness. Accordingly, conscious perceptual knowledge comes with knowledge that and of how one has it. Other forms of knowledge (e.g. a priori knowledge) are analogous. A distinction is drawn between primary and secondary knowledge, such that that there could be no secondary knowledge without some primary knowledge.

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